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The Expansion, Frontiers and Historical Archaeology: A Field for Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Kenneth E. Lewis
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Extract

The colonial states of Europe have left behind a record of their past not only in the documents relating to their overseas adventures but also in the objects they discarded or left behind. Although archaeology is usually thought of as a discipline concerned primarily with prehistory and ancient high civilizations, it is also useful in investigating the relatively recent expansion of European settlement, a process about which much is still unknown (1). In America archaeology has often been successfully employed in studying colonial societies in all stages of their development (2). Archaeology's ability to add to our knowledge about the past is based upon the extent to which its methodology can extract information comparable to that commonly gleaned from documentary sources. It would please me greatly if historians who had hitherto worked only with documents would begin to consider whether or not there exist archaeological possibilities in their study fields; though I realize that this could not be so in every instance.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , July 1979 , pp. 70 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1979

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References

NOTES

1. Concise statements of colonization as a process of change may be found in Prescott, J.R.V., The Geography of Frontiers and Boundaries {Chicago: Aldine, 1965)Google Scholar and Casagrande, Joseph B., Thompson, Stephen I. and Young, Philip D., ‘Colonization as a Research Frontier’, in Process and Pattern in Culture Change, ed. Manners, Robert A. (Chicago: Aldine, 1964), pp. 281–325Google Scholar.

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37. The number and arrangements of structures on an archaeological site may be ascertained in the absence of intact ruins by mapping the occurrence of structural artifacts most closely associated with architectural remains. A Synagraphic Computer Mapping program (SYMAP) was employed in the analysis of architectural remains at Camden because this program has the ability to graphically depict spatially disposed quantitative variables. It accomplishes this by taking the assigned values for the coordinate locations of data points, here the positions of the archaeological test units, and interpolating a continuous surface in the regions where there are no data points, basing these interpolated values upon the distances to and the values of the neighboring data points. The result is a contour map of the intensity of architectural artifact occurrence over the area of the site surveyed. For a detailed discussion of the applicability of the SYMAP program see Dougenik, James A. and Sheehan, David E., SYMAP User's Reference Manual (Cambridge, Massachusettes: Harvard University, 1975)Google Scholar.